Throughout This Is How You Lose Her, the reader
sees Yunior—the narrator and main character for most of the novel—describe the
essential “cheater’s guide to love” (Diaz 212).
Much of the novel is spent taking the reader through Yunior’s past
relationships along with giving a few segments on the relationships held by his
older brother, Rafa. By comparing the
Yunior that prevails in the chapters focusing on Rafa with the later version of
the narrator after the death of brother, a contrasting relationship develops
due to the significant character shift seen throughout the novel. Though the Yunior we see in the beginning of
the novel differs from most other Dominican men in his treatment/attitude of
women, we see a shift from this behavior to the stereotypical hyper-masculine
traits of his Dominican forefathers later in his story. However, this shift did not simply happen at
one specific point in time. As the story
begins describing Yunior’s life growing up, we see that he never really developed
a strong relationship with his father and was in constant disagreement with his
older brother over even the smallest of matters. Thus, it seemed a bit foreshadowing,
especially knowing a bit about Yunior’s past and future life from the other
novels that we have read, that he would turn out much different than his
brother and father.
In the
discussion of Diaz’s other novel, The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Yunior had turned out to become notorious
for developing relations with multiple different women in his college
years. This version of Yunior, our
narrator, differed greatly from the young narrator present in Drown, who seemed to have much more
respect for women in his early years and was truly “weak, full of mistakes, but
basically good” (Diaz 3). Therefore, it seems to be a mystery as to why the
reader suddenly sees a Yunior who cheats on his wife, the love of his
life. However, as known previously
through the other novels by Diaz, Yunior never developed a strong relationship
with his father that was essentially never around in his early years. Along with this, his older brother rarely
looked out for him, often watching passively as his father would hit him, and
even disregarding him toward the end of his life when he develops cancer, as seen
when Yunior states, “I tried to talk to him, but he never said nothing back”
(Diaz 118). As a result, it seemed that
Yunior never obtained any sort of male role model to really teach him how to
‘be a man’. He had seen his brother
bring multiple girls home, all of which had never amounted to a long-term
relationship. However, his mother had
always protected Rafa (seemingly much more than Yunior) even through his worst
instances since, “He had us all, the way only a pretty nigger can” (Diaz
31). Rafa was the oldest son, and on top
of this was extremely handsome, which were essentially the two main reasons
that Yunior’s mother protected him so fiercely.
Yunior lacked everything that his brother seemed to have, and thus it
was obvious that he was definitely not the ‘favorite’ child. However, this
neglecting from his mother, father, and brother all seemed to have a negative
effect on Yunior in his later years dealing with women. Through learning from the actions of his
father and brother by simple observation, Yunior developed his partial lack of
respect for women. Yet, he still differed from other Dominican men in that he
actually felt remorse for his cheating.
Through
observing the behavior of his brother and father (the constant rotation of
different women to sleep with) and the effects that this lifestyle had on each
of their respective outcomes, Yunior eventually developed an ability to pick up
women. However, he had never developed
the ability of his father and brother to disregard feelings that he had for
these women and therefore ends up being hurt by most of the women of his life.
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